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User Engagement Lab:: Youtube

October 28, 2008 — doctorhorrible(Josh Cohen)

The user engagement lab was quite an interesting experience. It is easily something that could be applied to youtube and our research.

The lab recorded people’s eye moments and where people focused most on the screen. Without our Youtube research, we want to see how many people use the community aspects of youtube. If we bring in a group of people into the lab and tell them to use youtube’s homepage and browse youtube as if they were at home, we’d see what they’d be looking at. By recording their eye movements, we could see if users left comments or whatnot on videos, or if they bothered to read them or not. Its possible they’d prefer to just watch the videos, and not use the community aspects. Or maybe we’d be able to see if we could move the location of the community tab and features to different locations on the screen that were more viewed by people.

By analizing people’s eye movements and if they looked at the community parts of YouTube, we could implement changes to the social aspects of youtube, to try and create a more vibrant social community and encourage more user comments, posts, and subscriptions, to make YouTube more like a mix between Facebook and what YouTube currently is.